Swarm Intelligence

1. Signs, not molecules, are the basic units in the study of life.2. The simplest entity to posses real semiotic competence is the cell. This is because the cell is a self-referential system based on redescription in the digital code of DNA (Hoffmeyer 1992).3. Subjectivity - or better "subjectness" - is not an either-or but a more-or-less phenomenon. Subjectness has its own natural history.4. Living systems exhibit extreme semiogenic behaviour based on the semiotic dynamics of semetic interactions, whereby habits come to signify the release of further habits in an infinitely long and complex web stretching back to the beginning of life and forward to the global semiosphere of tomorrow.5. Vertebrate bodies are supposed to function on the basis of swarm dynamic principles not unlike those pertaining to social insects.6. The swarm of cells constituting a human body should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of overlapping swarms of very different kinds. The minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms.7. An image arises in which the brain is functionally integrated into the body. Swarms of immune cells interact with swarms of nerve cells in maintaining the somatic ecology.8. Thoughts and feelings are not localised entities. They swarm out of our body collective.